Planet-scale photo geolocalization involves the intricate task of estimating the geographic location depicted in an image purely based on its visual features. While deep learning models, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have significantly advanced this field, understanding the reasoning behind their predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we present Combi-CAM, a novel method that enhances the explainability of CNN-based geolocalization models by combining gradient-weighted class activation maps obtained from several layers of the network architecture, rather than using only information from the deepest layer as is typically done. This approach provides a more detailed understanding of how different image features contribute to the model's decisions, offering deeper insights than the traditional approaches.
We investigate the feasibility of using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for real-time online episodic memory question answering. While cloud offloading is common, it raises privacy and latency concerns for wearable assistants, hence we investigate implementation on the edge. We integrated streaming constraints into our question answering pipeline, which is structured into two asynchronous threads: a Descriptor Thread that continuously converts video into a lightweight textual memory, and a Question Answering (QA) Thread that reasons over the textual memory to answer queries. Experiments on the QAEgo4D-Closed benchmark analyze the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) within strict resource boundaries, showing promising results also when compared to clound-based solutions. Specifically, an end-to-end configuration running on a consumer-grade 8GB GPU achieves 51.76
We present SITUATE, a novel dataset designed for training and evaluating Vision Language Models on counting tasks with spatial constraints. The dataset bridges the gap between simple 2D datasets like VLMCountBench and often ambiguous real-life datasets like TallyQA, which lack control over occlusions and spatial composition. Experiments show that our dataset helps to improve generalization for out-of-distribution images, since a finetune of Qwen VL 2.5 7B on SITUATE improves accuracy on the Pixmo count test data, but not vice versa. We cross validate this by comparing the model performance across established other counting benchmarks and against an equally sized fine-tuning set derived from Pixmo count.
This paper addresses Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the domain of Vocational Education and Training (VET), focusing on historical, digitized documents that suffer from OCR-induced noise. We propose a robust NER approach leveraging Noise-Aware Training (NAT) with synthetically injected OCR errors, transfer learning, and multi-stage fine-tuning. Three complementary strategies, training on noisy, clean, and artificial data, are systematically compared. Our method is one of the first to recognize multiple entity types in VET documents. It is applied to German documents but transferable to arbitrary languages. Experimental results demonstrate that domain-specific and noise-aware fine-tuning substantially increases robustness and accuracy under noisy conditions. We provide publicly available code for reproducible noise-aware NER in domain-specific contexts.
We propose a monocular depth estimation method based on visual autoregressive (VAR) priors, offering an alternative to diffusion-based approaches. Our method adapts a large-scale text-to-image VAR model and introduces a scale-wise conditional upsampling mechanism with classifier-free guidance. Our approach performs inference in ten fixed autoregressive stages, requiring only 74K synthetic samples for fine-tuning, and achieves competitive results. We report state-of-the-art performance in indoor benchmarks under constrained training conditions, and strong performance when applied to outdoor datasets. This work establishes autoregressive priors as a complementary family of geometry-aware generative models for depth estimation, highlighting advantages in data scalability, and adaptability to 3D vision tasks. Code available at "https://github.com/AmirMaEl/VAR-Depth".
As most ”in the wild” data collections of the natural world, the North America Camera Trap Images (NACTI) dataset shows severe long-tailed class imbalance, noting that the largest 'Head' class alone covers >50
We propose FutrTrack, a modular camera-LiDAR multi-object tracking framework that builds on existing 3D detectors by introducing a transformer-based smoother and a fusion-driven tracker. Inspired by query-based tracking frameworks, FutrTrack employs a multimodal two-stage transformer refinement and tracking pipeline. Our fusion tracker integrates bounding boxes with multimodal bird's-eye-view (BEV) fusion features from multiple cameras and LiDAR without the need for an explicit motion model. The tracker assigns and propagates identities across frames, leveraging both geometric and semantic cues for robust re-identification under occlusion and viewpoint changes. Prior to tracking, we refine sequences of bounding boxes with a temporal smoother over a moving window to refine trajectories, reduce jitter, and improve spatial consistency. Evaluated on nuScenes and KITTI, FutrTrack demonstrates that query-based transformer tracking methods benefit significantly from multimodal sensor features compared with previous single-sensor approaches. With an aMOTA of 74.7 on the nuScenes test set, FutrTrack achieves strong performance on 3D MOT benchmarks, reducing identity switches while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our approach provides an efficient framework for improving transformer-based trackers to compete with other neural-network-based methods even with limited data and without pretraining.
Recent advancements in Video Question Answering (VideoQA) have introduced LLM-based agents, modular frameworks, and procedural solutions, yielding promising results. These systems use dynamic agents and memory-based mechanisms to break down complex tasks and refine answers. However, significant improvements remain in tracking objects for grounding over time and decision-making based on reasoning to better align object references with language model outputs, as newer models get better at both tasks. This work presents an LLM-brained agent for zero-shot Video Question Answering (VideoQA) that combines a Chain-of-Thought framework with grounding reasoning alongside YOLO-World to enhance object tracking and alignment. This approach establishes a new state-of-the-art in VideoQA and Video Understanding, showing enhanced performance on NExT-QA, iVQA, and ActivityNet-QA benchmarks. Our framework also enables cross-checking of grounding timeframes, improving accuracy and providing valuable support for verification and increased output reliability across multiple video domains. The code is available at https://github.com/t-montes/viqagent.
Cross-Domain Image Retrieval (CDIR) is a challenging task in computer vision, aiming to match images across different visual domains such as sketches, paintings, and photographs. Existing CDIR methods rely either on supervised learning with labeled cross-domain correspondences or on methods that require training or fine-tuning on target datasets, often struggling with substantial domain gaps and limited generalization to unseen domains. This paper introduces a novel CDIR approach that incorporates textual context by leveraging publicly available pre-trained vision-language models. Our method, Caption-Matching (CM), uses generated image captions as a domain-agnostic intermediate representation, enabling effective cross-domain similarity computation without the need for labeled data or further training. We evaluate our method on standard CDIR benchmark datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in plug-and-play settings with consistent improvements on Office-Home and DomainNet over previous methods. We also demonstrate our method's effectiveness on a dataset of AI-generated images from Midjourney, showcasing its ability to handle complex, multi-domain queries.
